The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest entity in Palestinian society that leads the global BDS movement, calls on all speakers and participants to withdraw from the Islamic Archaeology Conference (ISAC) scheduled to be held in Warsaw, Poland, November 5-8, 2025.
Once again, the conference is in violation of the BDS movement’s anti-normalization guidelines. Furthermore, it includes speakers from Israeli institutions illegally based on occupied Palestinian land.
Normalization, agreed upon by the overwhelming majority in Palestinian society, is the participation in any project, initiative or activity, local or international, that brings together (on the same “platform”) Palestinians (and/or Arabs) and Israelis (individuals or institutions) without meeting the following two conditions:
- The Israeli side publicly recognizes the UN-affirmed inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, which are set out in the 2005 BDS Call.
- The joint activity constitutes a form of co-resistance against the Israeli regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.
While this conference ”invites researchers and professionals worldwide to comprehensively explore the Islamic material culture and analyse historical narratives and syntheses that the discipline contributes to,” it not only centers the Israeli speakers as “experts” in the field of Islamic antiquities and sites, but also features those who work for the complicit Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, and from Hebrew University, which is partially built on Israeli occupied Palestinian land.
The IAA has been deeply complicit since its establishment in serious crimes against our people, our heritage and our Arabic, Islamic and Christian civilization, in the systematic destruction and looting of this heritage carried out by Israel, and in its persistent attempts to erase Arab and Islamic identity and landmarks in the Palestinian homeland, in blatant violation of international law and of basic ethical principles that should guide this discipline.
The W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (AIAR), which was founded in 1920, is a US government-funded colonial institution located in occupied East Jerusalem. AIAR played a key role in the looting of the famed Dead Sea Scrolls from Palestinians.
Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus is partially built on land illegally expropriated from Palestinian owners in Israeli occupied East Jerusalem, in clear violation of international law, and therefore directly serves the ongoing land theft and dispossession of Palestinians. Israel’s settlement enterprise constitutes a war crime according to international law. The speaker affiliated with this university is therefore knowingly participating in a war crime.
The conference uses Palestinian and Arab participation as fig leaves for Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime to cover up its ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. Israel’s Gaza genocide has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and injured more than 100,000.
We therefore call on all speakers to withdraw from the conference and on participants to boycott it in order to do no harm to the Palestinian liberation struggle.